When comparing Listary vs cmder, the Slant community recommends cmder for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for Windows?”cmder is ranked 5th while Listary is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose cmder is:

Cmder builds on [ConEmu](https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5) console emulator, by adding enhancements from [clink](http://mridgers.github.io/clink/) (such as bash-style completion in cmd.exe and PowerTab in powershell.exe) and optionally extending it with [msysgit](http://msysgit.github.io), that brings Unix tools to Windows.

Pros

Pro

Search as you type everywhere

You can start typing on the desktop or any folders and it'll just search for you.

Pro

Supports other explorers

It supports not only Windows Explorer but also XYplorer, Directory Opus, Total Commander and all the other explorer alternatives.

Pro

It's also a launcher

Once you find the file you need, you can launch it or use custom actions.

Pro

Extends the powerful ConEmu

Cmder builds on ConEmu console emulator, by adding enhancements from clink (such as bash-style completion in cmd.exe and PowerTab in powershell.exe) and optionally extending it with msysgit, that brings Unix tools to Windows.

Pro

Minimal and portable version available

There is a portable version of cmder available which is just 10 MB in size. It can be put on an external device, like a USB stick, and run off it. There's no installation required.

Pro

Monokai color scheme

Cmder pretties up the default look of ConEmu using Monokai color scheme out of the box and allows flexible color and transparency schemes, including custom out-of-focus opacity.

Pro

Has built-in Quake style drop-down mode

This is an extremely useful mode whereby the console hides and shows on ctrl+~ similarly to a gaming console.This feature is inherited from ConEmu.

Pro

File explorer integration

Cmder can be added to the right-click menu, allowing the user to start a terminal session from the selected directory with a "Cmder Here" command. The functionality can be enabled by opening up a terminal with administrator privileges, navigating to the Cmder folder and executing .\cmder.exe /REGISTER ALL.

Pro

Works nicely with command line applications

Such applications include CMD, Powershell, and MinTTY.

Pro

Integrates with graphical applications

Portable GUI applications can be integrated directly into the interface of the terminal emulator.

For example, it's possible to integrate ST3 with cmder by moving the portable version of ST3 to /cmder/vendor/ and editing alias file in /cmder/config/aliases to include subl="%CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe" $1 -new_console:s75V. Now writing subl in the command line will open ST3. The alias of subl can be changed to whatever's needed and similarly, the -new_console option's parameters can be changed to alter how the text editor integrates with the terminal emulator. It can be horizontal or vertical splits of varying sizes or tabs, etc.

Pro

Highly flexible

Integrates with:

cygwin

mintty

powershell

msysgit

Cons

No cons yet!

Con

Issues with non-unicode characters

'ls' command can have issues with non-unicode characters such as cyrillic. As of 1.1.2, 'dir' can be used as a substitute that will properly display non-unicode characters. Unfortunately, it's an issue with msysgit that isn't being officially addressed (a workaround is available) thus no official ETA on the bugfix is available.

Con

Not as portable as advertised

Even though cmder is advertised as a "portable terminal emulator for Windows", it's not adequately minimalistic to be considered truly portable. In fact, one of the dependencies required to use it is the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015.